Advertisements are commonly used on the Internet to promote various products and services. Advertisements may comprise banner ads, links to web pages, images, video, text, etc. The various advertisements used to promote products on the Internet may be displayed according to a variety of formats, such as in conjunction with a ranked result set in response to a query, embedded in a web page, a pop-up, etc. The advertisements displayed to a user of a client device may be selected, redirecting the user to a website providing the product or service advertised.
Client devices, communicatively coupled to a network such as the Internet, are capable of accessing various websites that may display advertisements. For example, a user of a client device may submit a search query comprising one or more terms to a search engine, which causes the search engine to retrieve a result set comprising links to content, as well as advertisements responsive to the search terms provided by a user. The search engine displays the result set that it generates to a user who may then select or view items in the result set, including one or more advertisements.
Different advertisements may be more profitable or less profitable for a search engine provider to display as the amount paid by each advertiser for displaying an advertisement varies. Additionally, because a search engine provider may charge an advertiser a fee for each advertisement selected by a user, the frequency with which an advertisement is selected (e.g., the “clickability” of an advertisement) may be a significant factor in selecting which advertisements to display in response to a query, within a web page, as a pop-up, etc. Moreover, advertisers may have a plurality of advertisements pertaining to a particular product or service, whereby the advertiser measures the success of an advertisement by examining the number of users who select the advertisement when displayed in response to a given search request. Because users may be more responsive to a particular advertisement among a plurality of advertisements pertaining to a similar product or service, the advertiser may desire to display the advertisements that are the most likely to be selected in response to a given search request in order to increase the likelihood that users purchase the advertiser's products or services.
Current techniques for determining the clickability of advertisements utilize historical click through data of advertisements. Historical click through data indicates the frequency with which one or more advertisements were selected when displayed in response to a query, as a pop-up, etc. The use of historical click through data to determine the clickability of a given advertisement in response to a given query, however, requires the availability of click through data for the given advertisement. Therefore, the clickability of an advertisement may only be ascertained after a given advertisement has been distributed in response to a given query. Because the distribution of advertisements often involves the expenditure of financial resources, both search engine providers and advertisers may wish to ascertain the clickability of a given advertisement in response to a given query prior to expending financial resources on the advertisement.
While current techniques provide for the determination of the clickability of a given advertisement after click through data has been retrieved for the advertisement, current techniques fail to provide search engine providers and advertisers with a prediction or estimate of the clickability of a given advertisement prior to the retrieval of click through data for the advertisement. In order to overcome shortcomings with existing techniques, embodiments of the present invention provide systems and methods for calculating the predicted clickability of a given advertisement displayed in response to a query using advertisement analytics data as input to one or more predictive clickability functions. Embodiments of the present invention also provide for the determination of historical clickability functions, as well as combinations thereof, that may be used to predict the clickability of a given advertisement when displayed in response to a given query.